“In you get again,” said she. “Now we do the hair.”
Schnak obediently stepped back into the tub, wondering greatly, but aware that out of her sight there was some very rapid undressing, and in no time the Doctor had slipped into the tub behind her, enclosing Schnak’s thin body between her long elegant legs. Much dowsing of the dirty head; much shampooing with deliciously scented oil; much rinsing and at last a rough but playful drying.
“And now,” said the Doctor, laughing, “you are a pretty clean girl. How does it feel?”
Lying back in the tub herself, she drew Schnak backward against her own body, and, slipping her arms around her, caressed Schnak’s astonished nipples with soapy hands.
Schnak could not have said how it felt. Words were not her means of expression, or she might have said that it was paradisal. But it did float into her mind that all the books of reference concluded their pieces about the Doctor by saying that she was unmarried. Well, well, well.
Later they ceremoniously burned Schnak’s discarded clothes. The Doctor wanted to do it in the fireplace, but Schnak tested the chimney by burning some paper in the grate, and the immediate belching of smoke bore out her suspicion that there was a bird’s nest in the chimney. The Doctor was much impressed by this show of domestic wisdom. They burned the clothes in the back yard, after dark, and even danced a few steps around the bonfire.
Because Schnak had no clothes, she could not go home, nor did she wish to do so. She and the Doctor retired to bed, and there they drank rum mixed with rich milk, and Schnak lay in the Doctor’s arms and told her the story of her life, as she understood it, in a version that would greatly have astonished and angered her parents.
“An old story,” said the Doctor. “The gifted child; the Philistine parents. Loveless religion: craving for a larger life. Do you know what a Philistine is, child?”
“Somebody in the Bible?”
“Yes, but now the people who are against the things that you and I love—art, and the freedom without which art cannot exist. Have you been reading Hoffmann, as I told you?”
“Some of the stories.”
“Hoffmann’s life was a long fight with the Philistines. Poor devil! You have not read Kater Murr yet?”
“No.”
“Not an easy book, but you cannot understand Hoffmann without it. It is the biography of the great musician Kreisler.”
“I didn’t know he was as old as that.”
“Not Fritz Kreisler, stupid! A character invented by Hoffmann. One of his many alter egos. The great musician and composer Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, the romantic genius whom nobody understands and who has to put up with insults and slights from all the Philistine crew of the society in which he lives. His life has been written by a friend, and left on the desk; the tom-cat Murr finds it and writes his own life on the back of the sheets. So off goes the copy to the printer, who stupidly prints the whole thing as a unity, Kreisler and Kater Murr all mixed up in one book. But Kater Murr is a deeply Philistine cat; he embodies in himself everything that Kreisler hates and that is hostile to Kreisler. Kater Murr sums up his philosophy of life: ‘Gibt es einen behaglicheren Zustand, als wenn man mit sich selbst ganz zufrieden ist?’ You understand German?”
“No.”
“You should. Without German, very poor music. The tom-cat says: ‘Is there a cosier condition than being thoroughly satisfied with oneself?’ That is the philosophy of the Philistine.”
“A cosy condition; like having a good job as a typist.”
“If that is all you want, and you cannot see beyond it. Of course not all typists are like that, or there would be no audiences at concerts.”
“I want more than a cosy condition.”
“And you shall have it. But you will find cosy places, too. This is one of them.”
Kisses. Caresses of such skill and variety as Schnak would never have thought possible. Ninety seconds of ecstasy, and then deep peace, in which Schnak fell asleep.
The Doctor did not sleep for several hours. She was thinking of Johannes Kreisler, and herself.
4
The wine was very good. Beyond that, Simon Darcourt would not have dared to speak, for he did not consider himself knowledgeable about wines. But he knew a good wine when he drank it, and this was undoubtedly very good. The bottles, as Prince Max had called to his attention, bore conservative, rather spidery engraving that declared them to be reserved for the owners of the vineyard. Nothing there of the flamboyant labels, with carousing peasants or Old Master pictures of fruit, cheese, and dead animals that marked commonplace wines. But at the top of these otherwise reticent labels was an elaborate achievement of arms and underneath it a motto: Du sollst sterben ehe ich sterbe.
Thou shalt perish ere I perish, thought Darcourt. Did it refer to the owners of the display of arms, or to the wine in the bottles? Must be the aristocrats; nobody would claim that a wine would outlive anyone who might be drinking it. Suppose a very young person—sixteen, let us say—were given a glass at the family table; suppose some child of a wine-drinking home were given a little, mixed with water, so that it would not feel left out at a family feast. Was it asserted that sixty years later the wine would still be in first-rate condition? Not likely. Wines like that were sold by the greatest auctioneers, not by popular wine merchants. So the boast, or assertion, or threat—it could be all or any of those—must apply to the people whose blazon of nobility this was.
There those people were, sitting at the table with him. Prince Max, who must be well into his seventies, was as straight, as slim, and as elegant as when he had been a dashing young German officer. Only his spectacles, which he somehow managed to make distinguished, and the thinness of his yellowish-white hair, so carefully brilliantined and brushed straight back from his knobby brow, gave any sign of how old he might be. His gaiety, his exuberance, and his unquenchable flow of anecdote and chatter could have belonged to a man
half his age.
As for the Princess Amalie, she was as beautiful, as well-preserved, and as becomingly dressed as when Darcourt had first seen her when, during the past summer, she had made it so tactfully clear that if he wanted to know certain facts about the late Francis Cornish he must somehow provide her with the preliminary studies, from the hand of that same Francis Cornish, that had resulted in the Old Master drawing she used so lavishly, yet with such splendid understatement, in her advertisements. And that was what he had done.
The Clerical Cracksman, as he now thought of himself, had been just as adroit and just as lucky at the National Gallery as he had been at the University Library. The same approach to the curator of drawings, who was a friend and would not think of doubting Simon; the same casual, but swift, examination of the drawings in a special portfolio; a quick substitution of the drawings he had pinched from the Library, and which he carried tucked under the back strap of his M.B. waistcoat, for those that were the price of the Princess’s confidence; the same cheerful greeting to his friend as he left the archives of the Gallery. The Gallery had not yet got around to putting those beastly little marks on the drawings that set off alarms when one passed certain snoopy ray machines; indeed, it looked as if nobody had looked into the portfolio since first it had come to the Gallery over a year before. It was a very neat job, thought Simon, if he said so himself, and he had been lucky in the day he chose for his robbery, because it was a day when the Pope was visiting Ottawa, and everybody who might have been snooping about was in a distant field, watching the charismatic Pontiff celebrate an outdoor mass, and utter instructions and adjurations for their future conduct to the people of Canada.